Hiki the Black Tortoise

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Hiki the Black Tortoise is a character from the Kishin Douji Zenki series. He is a humanlike man with long green hair and red eyes, who wears a black suit.

He also has a second, more monstrous form, where he looks like a large and bulky man wearing a tortoise shell. Hiki is so powerful, that even Zenki's Rudra can't harm him.

Hiki the Black Tortoise is also known as just Hiki. The Sega Game Gear game Kishin Douji Zenki and the NEC PC-FX game Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight also refer to him as Hiki.

Hiki is the leader of the Shitennou, a group that follows the Inugami Roh and wants to help him achieve his goal in the manga and in Vajura Fight.

Manga
Hiki first appears when the Inugami Roh and Kokutei retreat after they stole a Hyouinomi from Zenki. Hiki and the other Shitennou prevent Zenki, Chiaki and Miki Souma to follow Roh and Kokutei.

The Shitennou are very powerful foes which no only try to protect Roh and Kokutei from Zenki and his friends, but claim that they do this so Roh can "bring justice to this greed filled world".

Ingame
As stated earlier, Hiki appears in only two of the Kishin Douji Zenki games, the Sega Game Gear game Kishin Douji Zenki and the NEC PC-FX game Vajura Fight.

Both of these games feature him as a boss.

While Kishin Douji Zenki has him appear in his first form in a stage that shows him floating in mid-air and a bunch of dead monks laying around, which is remniscent of his official appearance in the manga, Vajura Fight has him appear in his second form after Zenki and Chiaki leave the trainstation level.

Shitennou

 * The Shitennou, translated as the "Four Heavenly Kings", are a set of gods who govern the cardinal directions in the Buddhist Religion.

Hiki's name

 * The Kanji 墓, which is used for Hiki's name actually means "tomb".
 * 黒いカメ (Kuroi Kame) means "black tortoise".

Mistranslated names

 * In the Chinese manga and the Baradise translation, the Kanji for this name are mistranslated as Mu or the Bishamonten Mu, despite his name clearly being Hiki
 * The fact that Mu is a mistranslation of his name is even more obvious, if the reader has played Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight, which features the following name tag on the left next to Hiki's health bar: [[File:Hiki's name tag Vajura Fight.png]]
 * In Kishin Douji Zenki for the Sega Game Gear, Hiki also introduces himself as Hiki the Black Tortoise.


 * -|Ingame stats and behaviour=

Kishin Douji Zenki (Game Gear)
Hiki is a slender humanoid enemy. He has red eyes, wears a dark violet smoking and has white hair with a shade of green. Due to the game's color palette limitations and changes in lighting, his hair and his eyes sometimes appear in to be colored in varying shades.

Unlike the manga which calls him Hiki the Black Tortoise, the game has him introduce himself as "Hiki". Something similar can be seen with Kimon the White Tiger who is also only called "Kimon" in the games he appears in.

In this game, Hiki only appears in his first, human-like form. His second form is only mentioned when Zenki defeats him after being revived by Goki, which is shown by Great Demon God Zenki's face appearing onscreen and flashing a light at the player.

Hiki's third form never appears ingame.

Hiki is first introduced when he makes an appearance remniscent to his second appearance in Volume 4 of the manga. After paying Master Daisoujou and his monks a "visit", Zenki and Chiaki notice that something is wrong and find a bunch of dead monks lying around.

Unlike the manga, Kishin Douji Zenki for the Game Gear has the dead monks and Hiki appear in the outdoors area of the monks' exorcism shrine. Also the scene of Hiki throwing Daisoujou's head towards the heroes is missing and Miki Souma only appears in the cutscene preceding Chibi Zenki's or Chiaki's encounter with Hiki.

Once Hiki has introduced himself, Chiaki will perform the Vajura-On-Ark spell and turn Zenki into his true form, cue Demon God Zenki fighting a boss battle against Hiki in his first form.

Hiki's first attack
Similar to Dokuro Sou, Hiki doesn't exactly have separate phases of the boss battle, but rather two different attacks he uses.

Hiki starts the fight levitating in mid-air (and out of Zenki's reach), on the right side of the screen, where he will proceed to generate multiple yellow Kanji spelling the words "hurt", "pain", "injure" and "harm".

Hiki will then proceed to shoot the four Kanji at Zenki, who has to avoid them. After this, the Kanji will circle around the boss arena and attempt to hit Zenki, while Hiki keeps levitating in place and laughs at Zenki.

Zenki now has to destroy the four Kanji, which can be done by punching them with the Diamond Horn. This will destroy the Kanji (that was hit) instantly.

Once all four Kanji are destroyed, Hiki will fly towards Zenki, leaving two afterimages behind. If Zenki is fast enough, he can hit the real Hiki with the Diamond Horn before Hiki has a chance to make afterimages. If Zenki is to slow, he will be forced to play the guessing game. The real Hiki is always the one on the very left.

If Zenki manages to hit Hiki with the Diamond Horn, he will deal one unit of damage, which causes Hiki to stay at the left side of the screen and fly out of reach again. He stays in mid-air and will now start his second attack.

Hiki's second attack


Hiki's second attack, again has him generating Kanji. This time he will generate three red Kanji, depicting the words "blood", "perfection" and "rest in peace".

In Japan, "rest in peace" is written as one Kanji, which serves a similar function to its English acronym "R.I.P.".

Unlike his first move, his second one has him fling the three Kanji into the sky. Soon enough, they drop at an alarmingly fast rate and vanish into the ground. After this, the ground will shake and small rocks will leap around where they are going to reappear. The will then shoot up drop down again, rinse and repeat.

While Zenki can simply walk out of the way to avoid harm (the small rocks can't hurt him, only the Kanji and Hiki are able to do that), he has to stand in place and use his aerial block to destroy the Kanji. To do this, the player has to hold up and keep it pressed. When a Kanji drops onto Zenki in this state, it will be destroyed.

Again, Zenki has to destroy all three Kanji, before Hiki decides to use his afterimage move again. This time he will move to the right, but he can be harmed just like after his first move, only this time the Hiki on the very right is always the real one.

Once Zenki has hit Hiki, the latter will start over from his first attack.

Cutscene - After Hiki's defeat
Once Zenki has depleted Hiki's health to nothing, the latter will go up in flames and explode. After this, another cutscene can be seen.

Chiaki cheers at Zenki, who has successfully defeated Hiki, but Miki Souma mourns the death of Master Daisoujou and his fellow Kagekouya monks. Zenki is confused, but Miki Souma keeps on going. Chiaki can't stand Miki Souma's whining and gets serious. She tells him to get hold of himself.

After this, the game goes back to the world map, now showing the Kagekouya monks' shrine in ruins. The game now continues as normal.

Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight
Hiki is a bulky humanoid enemy. He has red eyes, wears detailed, black armor, an orange belt and has green hair. Also due to the game taking clues from the manga, Hiki's left eye is missing, which he lost when Zenki used Rudra against him.

Just like Kishin Douji Zenki for the Game Gear, Vajura Fight never refers to Hiki by his full name of Hiki the Black Tortoise, just calling "Hiki" instead.

Vajura Fight only features Hiki's second form, which is first introduced in a destroyed trainstation. Appearing only once, Hiki has only two dialogues.

His pre-boss fight dialogue has him exclaim how he wants revenge on Zenki and Chiaki while his defeat has him cry over his loss. (Hiki: "I-I have lost?! This is impossible!!!")

Similar to his appearance in the manga, Hiki has some kind of buster gun, which he uses shoot small laser pellets and charged laser shots at Zenki and Chiaki.

While he usually prefers jumping around firing his laser pellets from the distance, he also has a charge attack, where he will dash straight into Zenki and Chiaki in an attempt to tackle them.

Hiki only uses the charge attack when the player gets close to him, which makes it rather hard to avoid the attack.

Getting hit by the pellets will cause a low anmount of damage to the player, while the charge shot will deal a medium anmount and the dash is pretty dangerous if it's not interrupted.

Hiki's charge can only be interrupted by Chiaki's spell tag slap or Chibi Zenki's flying kick, which are their strongest attacks respectively. Demon God Zenki is an exception to that rule. Any of his attacks will interrupt Hiki and cause him to flinch for a slightly longer duration than Chiaki's or Chibi Zenki's attacks.

Vajura Fight

 * Interestingly Demon God Zenki can stun Hiki by using any of his attacks. It is likely that this is the case to make the game more balanced as it takes his increased strength over Chibi Zenki and Chiaki into account, thus staying true to its own values.
 * The game respects Hiki as an asymmetrical character by giving him a mugshot for each direction he faces instead of mirroring him. This preserves the fact that Hiki has a healthy right eye and a scar instead of his left eye.
 * This is a trait unique to Vajura Fight, which also applies to Zenki, allowing him to keep the facing of his tiara's middle horn and his dominant fang intact.

Buster Gun

 * Hiki's buster gun is very similar to the one from the unrelated Mega Man / Rockman series. The similarities go even further when he uses a "charge shot" or shoots little pellets like Mega Man / Rockman.
 * ''His ability to use a dashing charge also makes him similar to Vile / Vava from the Mega Man X / Rockman X series, but as Hiki acutally predates Vile / Vava, it might be that Vile / Vava was inspired by Hiki to a certain extend.


 * -|Gallery (Manga)=